Introducing New Getting Started Guides

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I’m Dave Richey, Director of Training for Appcelerator. We’re going to be expanding our documentation and training efforts for Titanium. My first project has been a series of Getting Started guides, for Mac, Windows and Linux, to help get Titanium Mobile up and running. These guides cover the steps needed to install Titanium and run two of the sample programs. We want to hear from developers — please let me know what additional documentation and training resources will be helpful.

11 COMMENTS

Thank you very much for this! Having these tutorials in .pdf files will be extremely beneficial.

I think I can speak for everyone when I say, we need the API reference guides in a format like this. Not only do we need the guides in a portable, collected format, we also need more detail.

One of the things I ran into recently was using Titanium.Platform.name. The guide states that name is a string and returns the name of the device, but we are not told what are acceptable values for this property. So, I tried to use Ti.Platform.name == ‘iphone’ which did not work. Only by looking through the Oil Reporter code from Intridia did I see that the only values used were == ‘android’ and != ‘android’.

All values that properties can have would be extremely helpful.

Also, properties I see used in other apps (such as Ti.UI.orientation = Ti.UI.PORTRAIT) are nowhere to be found in the current documentation (at least not that I can find). A complete listing of all available methods, properties and events for every API would be invaluable.

[…] I will not show you how to install any of the frameworks, SDKs, etc. There are good tutorials and HowTo’s that will show you this so I don’t want to repeat what’s already out there. Update: Appcelerator team just published three pdf documents on how to install Titanium on each of the supported platforms ( Linux / OsX / Windows ). You can download it from their blog […]

I’d love to have a short guide on memory management best practices. With mobile devices having pretty tight memory constraints, a little more information would really help.

Also, others have asked for more ability for community members to contribute information. Comments pages in the docs could allow people to provide feedback and peer-to-peer tips. (MindTouch’s Deki wiki is has a solid page comments feature.)

Thank you for the guide. One thing that struck me is that it tells you to install the 64-bit or 32-bit JDK as appropriate for your platform. Is it not the case that you should install the 32-bit JDK in all cases as the 64-bit one doesn’t work with Ti ?

I also think that Kitchensink is too big and getting it to work puts a lot of prospective developers off. It should be split out into KitchensinkUI, KitchensinkNet, KitchensinkPlatform and so on. Smaller projects that will build and install more quickly.

Complete and accurate API documentation would be a good first step; after coding with Ti for a couple months I’ve learned to never trust the API docs and instead rely on the Kitchen Sink and (especially) the raw Objective-C source code.

In my dream world, the API docs list every method, property, and event (not just 70-80% of them), have non-generic descriptions and recommendations on each one (like, you must use window.add instead of window.setToolbar to add a toolbar control to a window…), and have a lot of brief examples (including screen shots) at the bottom.

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